Previous research suggests that a woman's past experiences of being parented will have a significant influence on how she parents her own children. This study, reported by Amanda Maxwell, Julie Proctor and Linda Hammond, aimed to explore young care-leaving mothers' experiences of motherhood, focusing on their experience of themselves as mothers, their relationship with their child and their understanding of their child's experiences. Six mothers were interviewed who had spent time in care and were teenagers at the time of the birth of their child. They also completed diaries of their experiences over a two-week period. Data were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) and super-ordinate themes were identified. These themes were represented as dialectical positions and included: the ideal and reality; motherhood as building positive views of self and other, but also highlighting vulnerability; identification with her child but also feeling taken over by him or her; and external world as needed but also unwanted and destabilising. These results are discussed in relation to existing literature, and practice and research implications are considered.
Randomly selected clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, and oncologists weremailed a questionnaire assessing attitudes toward suicide and the personal, professional, and societal values which underlie these attitudes. Suicides in the face of physical illness were judged to be significantly more acceptable than suicides committed in response to chronic psychiatric illness. Psychologists were most accepting, and oncologists least accepting, of suicide in response to chronic pain. There were no significant differences in the acceptability of suicide between those professionals who had experienced suicidal ideation themselves and those who had not.We report the attitudes of selected health professionals toward suicide, as well as the personal, professional, and societal values upon which they are based. General attitudes, opinions in response to specific situations, and personal and professional experiences involving suicide were examined using a questionnaire developed for this study. In addition, scenarios developed by Deluty (1988-89a,b) assessed attitudes toward suicide as a function of age and gender of the suicide victim; age, gender, and professional specialty of the evaluator; and the type of illness that precipitated the suicide.It was predicted that health professionals who are more familiar with chronic clinical depression (i.e., psychiatrists and clinical psychologists) would be more accepting of suicide in cases where the suicidal individual suffers from chronic mental illness than would physicians (i.e., oncologists) less familiar with such disorders. This is consistent with Goffman's (1963) hypothesis that familiarity with deviance tends to increase its acceptability, and with the findings of Swain and Domino (1985) that family physicians were less accepting of suicide than psychiatrists and psychologists.
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